Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Adjustments and the Learning Curve

I was trying to switch from embroidery to decorative stitching. I forgot to swap out a piece of hardware and broke a needle. Not just broke, shattered into many pieces. Sigh. I wasn't able to get all of the bits of needle out of the bobbin area right away. I ended up pulling out the vacuum cleaner attachments after many attempts with the lint brush. I'd clean, try sewing, discover the tension was incorrect, then go back to cleaning. In all the testing, a metal fragment knocked the tension for the bobbin thread out of whack. It was too tight.
Gaahh. Normally, having the bobbin tension out of whack is a significant problem. It is not at all easy to adjust the tension on the bobbin. Well, on all of my other machines, it was difficult. However, on the 830, I was provided with a special tool and the bobbin case has a ratchet style tension adjustment. I moved the tension one notch/click and tested, moved it a second notch/click and tested and poof! The tension was again correct.
While many might say that the 830 tension is twitchy and difficult, I think that adjusting the bobbin tension on this machine is much easier than on any other machine I've owned.
On the other hand, I also have learned that I need to use the software on the 830 that will prevent the error that caused the broken needle in the first place. I neglected to tell the machine that I had changed hardware. If I had done that, the machine would have prevented me from stitching with hardware that didn't work with the decorative stitch I had chosen.